“Turn around,” said the quiet voice.
He obeyed and had to repress a start of surprise—how efficiently, he could not be sure, but it was almost certain that his quarry would be preoccupied with alarm at this intrusion, so there was some leeway for uncontrolled reaction. He had expected what pictures had shown him: a pudgy, rather ugly, self-indulgent child. In fact, behind the rifle that was leveled at him over a sheltering rock stood a slim, wiry figure likely to be taller than himself when upright and seeming a good deal tougher.
Though that remains to be decided. . .
For a while the two studied each other: the hunter in plain sight, clad in open shirt, jeans, heavy climbing-boots, the quarry almost hidden by the rock so that the rifle was like a symbol for armour. But the bare tanned arms that were visible were lean and muscular and the face under the roughly cropped fair hair was harsh with enmity.
“All right.” The quarry gestured with the muzzle of the gun. “You’re not armed, I guess. Move away from your pack, though.”
Now that the long-awaited confrontation was upon him, Braden was having trouble controlling his excitement. Doing as he was told, however, he concentrated on simple ideas.
What’s all this about? Have I run into a criminal in hiding?
But the next words he heard, uttered in a slow drawl of puzzlement, told him that his precautions were in vain.
“Braden—Daniel Braden, is that right? But I don’t know anyone called Braden. And yet you seem to know me.”
A headshake. A whitening of the knuckles that still clasped around the stock of the gun. Braden sighed and chose a direct onslaught rather than further prevarication.
“You’re not what I expected from your pictures, Lesley.”
“What?”
“I thought you’d be fat. You started out fat. But I guess starving in a hole halfway up a mountain—and scrambling up and down that slope every time you need supplies—would take weight off anybody.”
Bewilderment was coming to his aid. Uncertain, letting the gun’s threatening mouth move to one side, the quarry asked, “Are you somebody who used to know me when—?”
Hope, hunger—some kind of craving after human companionship—whatever it was, she moved from behind the protecting rock. Braden studied her critically. She was quite naked, which was among the many things he might have expected but hadn’t thought about, because after all who was there for at least five miles in any direction to complain? Her fair hair had been slashed merely to keep it out of her eyes and her face was like the rest of her, tanned to a wooden color by the merciless desert sunshine. But the shape was good—square shoulders contrasted with small round breasts and wide feminine hips— and the lessening of the old puppy-fat allowed her fine bone structure to show through.
God damn, she’s turned out beautiful!
That thought, welling from the animal level of his being, breached the careful camouflage beyond repair and his mind bloomed like a beacon. The gun snapped back to its former aim.
“You know me.” The words were forced out on breath alone, with no voice to drive them.
“Sure I know you,” Braden said. “You’re Lesley Wolker, and you can read my mind.”
“Oh God. Oh God.” The sounds died on the bare face of the hill like seeds cast into crevices among stark rock. “How— how—?”
“How did I find you?” Braden supplied briskly, much relieved at the girl’s obvious terror. “Why, it was pretty simple really. I started with the premise that there should by now be at least one efficient telepath in the United States, and possibly more. It was only logical that with the high level of success obtained from randomly-chosen subjects by people like Rhine, someone would have been born who was endowed with the full talent. And such a person—Well, you read Wells’s The Country of the Blind? Only you’re in a country of the deaf—and noise can kill.”
Lesley’s face writhed as though he had put a hot iron to the smooth mound of her belly.
“A person like that would either go insane or run and hide. And in the modern world there aren’t many places one can hide. A desert or a mountain seemed to me the only possible choices, and if such a person were to be born in the big cities where most of our population is now concentrated, then—short of finding a usable route up to the Canadian backwoods—an area like this one would be the closest and easiest escape hole. I don’t know what kind of torment such a person would undergo, but it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that it would be so bad the victim would flee in panic to the nearest lonely spot, without taking time to wonder if later on there would be a chance of moving somewhere else.
“So I took a map and made some measurements—and then I checked the missing persons files in every city where they’d let me get at them and checked those against pertinent genealogical tables and—” Braden snapped his fingers. “Five years of that. More than a year, now, asking around in every hole-in-corner town near the areas I’d selected as possibilities. And in that particular one over there”—he pointed in the general direction of the smoke smudge he had toasted earlier—“they told me about a mysterious woman who occasionally comes down from the hills to buy basic foods, always wearing the same overly tight blouse and shorts which are now pretty well in rags. There’s something to be said for old-fashioned prejudices. They talk about your legs every time the conversation gets dull—did you know that? Yes, I guess you must know.”
He gave her a grin that turned the corners of his mouth into a sketch for horns.
“Also,” he concluded, “you must know what it is I came to get you for.”
Lesley’s face had set into a feral mask and the rifle was
